Ginger Jar Food
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Definitely club class… the brilliant ‘flight’ lunch at Maze
Last week I was treated to a late birthday meal at the Gordon Ramsey’s (or more Jason Atherton’s) Maze in Mayfair, London. I’d wanted to go for an age, but was looking after the coffers. However, now we’re in the financial doldrums of early 2010, lots of London’s finest restaurants are offering excellent lunch and evening set meal deals which give you access to fine dining with costs little higher than a boozy lunch at Strada.Maze offers what it calls a lunchtime ‘flight’ menu – four tasting plates for £28 (you can bump this up if you’re super hungry). What I especially liked though was the ‘flight’ wine tasting menu – 3 x 125ml glasses of wine to accompany your meal for just £12. Usually this is where the fine dining meal deal comes unstuck – here, your budget is safe!
So now we know we’ve got a good price, how was the food?
We got to choose from around seven savoury plates and three sweet plates to build our meal. We had a hard job eliminating dishes because the flavour combinations were singing out of the menu to me… John Dory with confit cod cheeks, quail with kohl rabi, salt marsh lamb with lamb consommé. Plus, there are lots of other complex elements to each dish, too many to list, which although tiny, do effect the overall taste .
Presentation is hugely important at Maze, but I’m a sucker for beautiful plating which invites me through the layers of the dish, so I was in my own personal heaven. More importantly though, flavour is in no way compromised over this beauty. A shallow splash of consommé on the lamb dish was rich and powerful, allowing itself to soak up the chucks of lamb which fell into it when you so much as looked at it. Eyes were closed during the eating of a couple of elements, oh, and in the drinking of the not too sweet dessert wine.
Desserts ended the meal with a flourish too (and, did I mention the excellent dessert wine?!). My dish, constucted around Yorkshire rhubarb, was topped with a genius little rhubarb and lime sorbet with pink peppercorns ground on top, while my friend’s posh rice pudding certainly kept her quiet. For those without a sweet tooth you could have a cheese course – the menu is an all round crowd pleaser.
Final word – book now before the sunshine comes out and the offers dry up!
Food: 9/10
Value for Money: 9/10
Service: 7.5/10
Would I go again? Hell yes.
Maze
Oh, looks fab and I love the photos. Take me next time?
[...] get my wrong, I love fine dining (see Maze review if you need any proof), but there comes a time when the call of smokey hickory or chipotle [...]